PREFACE.
Dear Friends,
I have here collected together some few essays, read at different times to you, and some additional thoughts that I hope may be of service. I would not have undertaken to publish them written as they were in odd leisure moments after work, but that the request came to me from several sources for diverse reasons. Hence such weak composition or unsound logic as may be found in them, by yourselves or by any chance readers outside your own circle, I hope you and they will pardon, recognizing over all their sincerity. For outside readers they were not certainly written and delivered, yet you will see, owing no doubt to my more occasional contact with, and knowledge of, the wealthier classes, that I have sometimes turned away from you, and direct—not in admiration—upon them. Perhaps, therefore, and despite, I shall find such readers too.
I cannot profess, either, to be distinctly original, who owe so much to the mental stimulus given me by these great and true leaders of our modern thought, Emerson, Euskin, and Carlyle; still, if I have served even momentarily as an intermediate link to the souls of these mighty men I shall have fulfilled an important office. But, indeed, my thoughts are the thoughts of very many "thinking folk" to-day, and have only found their way through me to a particular expression for your special needs.
Some of you may complain that I have assumed too great a simplicity amongst my readers—the canny, staid, well-read Radical weaver being a celebrity with his brother workmen. Others may equally blame me for a rather objectionable metaphysical bent here and there, hardly suited to the comparatively uneducated minds amongst you. Certainly this double consciousness has been present to myself, i.e., the necessity to be both simple yet pointed and strong; and it has largely affected both my matter and my style. Otherwise,
